By Kathleen Welch
The MIT Press, 1999

Reviewer: Raymie McKerrow
Ohio University

Electric Rhetoric offers to composition studies faculty a challenge that, if heeded, would remake composition pedagogy. Through a richly textured, broadly supported argument, Professor Kathleen Welch presents a powerful polemic against entrenched interests who, unfortunately, may not even read this critique, distanced as they are from ever seeing in television an "electric rhetoric" worthy of their time or attention. While other disciplines would readily acknowledge the performative nature of the new literacy, as evinced through our students immersion in a televisual and computer based world, composition studies has retained a traditional focus on literacy as print derived. Thus, current pedagogy, except that which as examined the influence of computer literacy on writing styles, remains ensconced within a formula extolling exposition, narration, argument as the prime canons of instruction. Professor Welch provides a highly critical account of the tradition in the context of opening of possibilities for a re-visioned future in pedagogy‚one that takes into account where students live. Ultimately, her goal is to move humanities, specifically through composition studies, back into the mainstream of intellectual and active living. Seeing writing from the perspective of a rhetoric that is electric, as in the case of the influence of video as a delivery mechanism for ideas and learning, repositions writing as a performative art.

Welch begins with a pre-Aristotelian Isocratean perspective. She is not content to allow a reinterpretation of the Isocratean Sophistic to take center stage without also acknowledging the highly raced and gendered nature of that era; consequently, she invokes Aspasia and specifically Diotima's influence as a counterpoint to an otherwise gendered rhetoric that would exclude women. She also gives strong credence to Bernal's reinterpretation of racial history in pinpointing the need to broaden the scope of our thinking; she draws a clear analogy from Bernal's re-racing history to the possibility of re-racing our own disciplinary ways of presenting ideas. The result is a highly reconfigured, energized sense of an Isocratean/Diotimic Sophistic that stands as the framework within which to reinterpret writing pedagogy in our own age. As engaged as Isocrates was in linking education and culture in his own time, so too should we be similarly engaged in our time.

A brief chapter review may be helpful in visualizing the argument. Chapter one presents an overview of the text's argument. Chapter two realigns Isocratean rhetoric with a reformulation of oralism/auralism in framing the critique of traditional perspectives. Chapter three continues the focus on Isocrates, this time with the addition of a re-gendered sense of how his emphasis on the intersection of rhetoric and culture would operate through the inclusion of women's role (aside from this purpose, Welch also provides a clear rationale for rethinking the role of women in the construction of rhetorical theory in that era). Welch then moves in chapter four to what is termed "next rhetoric," thus suggesting that change will be the order of the day-it is not sufficient to call for a 'new' rhetoric as if that would be the last. The controversy over Bernal's thesis is reviewed, with an eye toward its lessons for how disciplines guard their own cultures to the exclusion of the views of others. Chapter five continues the 'rhetorical turn' begun in four with an examination of the new technologies as rhetorics. The key emphasis, as exemplified in an excellent critical analysis of a Tom Brokaw Nightly News episode, is on overcoming the traditional dichotomy between a print oriented and an oral/visual oriented world, wherein one lives solely within one or the other, without thinking in terms of how the literacy of either might affect the other. The last chapter focuses again on screen rhetoric, and includes a sharply written, incisive commentary on how a commercial might be analysed within the context of the text's orientation. The commentary, in this instance using an IBM commercial that purports to valorize the role of race while simultaneously subverting it through the continuation of popular stereotypes of blackness, is worth the price of the text.

If the goal of the text were achieved, the resulting new literacy "constitutes intersubjective activity in encoding and decoding screen and alphabetic texts within specific cultural practices and recognizes the inevitable deployment of power and the control that larger entities have over" electric rhetorics (p. 135).

Writing as I do from the Communication discipline, there are some small points that might be offered by way of critique. I understand the criticism Professor Welch has regarding the positioning of writing by those in communication who have examined classical rhetoric, including the recovery of sophistic perspectives. I'm not sure I would go as far as she does in resurrecting writing as the architectonic art, though that may be an unfair gloss on her larger argument that oralism/auralism and writing should be seen in concert with rather than opposed to, one another.

While it is arguably the case that composition studies has not examined the grammar and syntax of electric rhetorics, specifically television, these have been elsewhere examined. Greater attention to where such work has been done would strengthen her argument, and lessen the sense that one would reinvent a grammar already understood in other intellectual domains. The same could be said of the role of performance - that conception of rhetoric has been a strong influence over the last decade within communication studies, especially as articulated by essays in such journals as Text and Performance Quarterly. Working from that literature would only strengthen the argument for seeing rhetoric in performative terms.

In total, this is a work that I would highly recommend to communication scholars, as it positions the argument against traditional pedagogy in clear and compelling terms, and offers a unique and defensible reinterpretation of an Isocratean Sophistic that rhetorical theorists would do well to heed.